Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

Anything that's made by humans is about humans, whether it's about gods or aliens or anything; it's about some sort of expressive nature about us.

It doesn't matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth.

I think there is no culture in which music is not very important and central. That's why I think of us as a sort of musical species.

I don't like that whole "art should challenge you" thing. Because I don't feel like art actually does challenge you. I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything.

Understand that there is no relationship between your inner happiness and your inner joy and the outer things that you experience and behold in the world, that it all begins with you, the world is a mirror to your own Self, when you can look at things and feel joy not in the things but in yourself.

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.

Access to your true essence will give you insight into the mirror of relationship, because all relationship is a reflection of your relationship with yourself.

Why on earth do you carry a mirror around with you?” “It's purely a defensive device. We seldom quarrel, and this is one of the reasons. Can you imagine yourself getting all worked up and contorted and illogical and then coming face to face with yourself, looking at yourself exactly as you look to everyone else?

Say it to them. Or say it to yourself in the mirror. Say it in a letter you'll never send or in a book millions might read someday. I think you deserve to look back on your life without a chorus of resounding voices saying 'I could've, but it's too late now.'

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

Music mirrors where we should go, have gone and can go. Music is an abstraction.

This is the birth of the modern human soul. The artists are like us, not like the Neanderthals, who had no culture - and who incidentally were still roaming the landscape at the time the paintings were made. It is striking that there is a distant cultural echo that seems to reach all the way down to us, over dozens of millennia.

When you make a record, your own record, and you don't even recognize it yourself, it's hard to think if anybody else is going to recognize.

When I can't see myself in the mirror, I can't even feel myself, and I begin to wonder if I exist at all.

Art is a game only if you playat it, a mirror that reflects from the inside out.

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

There's a lot of sub-conscious stuff you may write but you don't then suddenly sit down and take out your analytical books and say: I'm determined to find out where this came from. You'd probably be wrong anyway.

No matter how individual we humans are, we are a composite of everything we are aware of. We are a mirror of our times.

Without arts programmes there's only reality TV, and reality TV needs the arts to show it what reality is.

The role of the painter . . . is to project that which sees itself in him.

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome.

The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative. ... They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves.

Yeah, unfortunately [ films like Miss Julie are a dying breed]. And that is sad, because we need these. Like we need books, we need classical music, we need ballet, we need opera, to remind us really of who we are and why we are, and we need in movie houses - even to be in a movie - where you sit and see not only excitement and man-hero, woman-hero, you need quietly, just like that Hawking movie we talked about, to know how people overcome.

I think novelists, when they write their books, end up having occasionally serving a purpose and playing roles that they never really fully either intended or even understood.